Joe Diaz

Welcome to Week 10 of Full STEAM Ahead! This week’s package was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab and is all about getting creative with math! How can math help you create your own animations and design your own games?

Many of the activities will use Scratch, a block-based visual programming language, designed to let you code your own animations, games, and other interactive projects. In the process of creating Scratch projects, key math concepts, such as X and Y coordinates to control the position of your characters in an animation and variables to keep track of the score in a game will become useful! Math concepts can become more meaningful and understandable when they are put to use making a project that interests the person making it.

It is also important to note that Week 10 will mark the end of our current Full STEAM Ahead “term”. All of the existing units will remain online, as we assess where to go next. We will be thinking about ways to apply the units we’ve developed, what kinds of supporting materials and professional development that we could add, and what form new units might take in the future.

If you have input on what would be useful, send us a message via the contact form on our front page. Thanks for visiting, and we look forward to further engaging with this community. Full STEAM Ahead!

Welcome to Week 9 of Full STEAM Ahead! This package was put together by the members of MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group and MIT CSAIL’s App Inventor team as part of MIT’s larger effort to Democratize AI Education. The materials in this package include materials for students in grades K-12 who have a wide range of programming and AI experience. Students and their families will have the opportunity to explore the AI systems they use every day, learn more about the ethical implications of AI systems, and get the chance to create their own apps that use AI models to recognize images and audio clips.

Have you ever watched a video that YouTube recommended to you? Have you ever used a Snapchat filter to add dog ears to your head? Have you ever asked Alexa or Siri a question? If so, you have used artificial intelligence! Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a computer system that performs tasks such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making. It not only powers some of the technologies that we are familiar with, but is used in fields such as healthcare and space exploration. Through the activities in this package, learners will be able to:

• Identify AI systems that are used every day
• Think deeply about the data that powers AI technologies
• Design AI systems that take multiple perspectives into account
• Create apps that contain models that recognize images and audio

If you enjoy the materials here, please check out some of our other resources and materials at aieducation.mit.edu.

Welcome to Week 8! Back in Week 4: Making Music and Sounds, we wanted people to take the first (whole) step into making music by using everyday sounds – but we have so much more to show you! Some of the things that we wanted to squeeze into Week 4 are now here in Week 8 – a little bit of physics, basic music theory, and a few advanced instrument builds. Plus, we have even more interviews including some Q&A with MIT experts and community artists!

This week, we want you to consider the following four topic areas:

Seeing Sound – Explore some math and physics ideas that describe the sounds we hear.

Turning Sound into Music – Learn some basics about music theory, the language that most music is built upon.

Amazing Instruments – Check out some surprising musical instruments to inspire your next musical experiment.

Advanced Instruments Builds – Ready to build or invent some more complex instruments? Check out our Amazing Instruments playlist for inspiration.

Again, we can’t wait to see what you build, and we encourage you to share all and any of it on this week’s forums and online using the #MITFullSTEAM hashtag!

This week’s K-12 package highlights invention once more as we join with Lemelson-MIT to announce their 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winners who are recognized for their technology-based inventions as graduate students or undergraduate teams in one of four prize categories: “Cure it!,” “Eat it!,” “Move it!,” and “Use it!.” To celebrate these awards, we have released another package of fun invention activities and videos called Inventing Matters!

This week, we want you to consider why inventing is important and how you can do it yourself. Take a look through the different categories to try out different activities related to language, music, food, shoe design, and more! We also encourage you to learn about the current and past collegiate winners and InvenTeam grant recipients whose inventions exemplify the prize categories and to use project-based learning activities to find that opportunities for invention are everywhere!

Don’t forget that you can share your invention ideas using our forums or on social media using #MITFullSTEAM (with parent permission).

Have fun inventing!